There is a physical limit to the degree of detail a picture can have, since its highest spatial frequency component cannot be higher than half the number of pixels per unit length of the image. Below this limit, the degree of detail of an image can vary depending on the subject matter shown, on the quality of processing etc. In the following description, we will distinguish between these two aspects by using the term “resolution” in connection with the above physical upper limit, and “image quality” in connection with the amount of detail perceived by a viewer in a specific image.
Conventional image quality enhancement techniques, described e.g. in documents [1]-[3] listed in the appendix to this application, rely on the fact that in video data, the content of subsequent images is partly repetitive, and that high-frequency information which is missing in a given image can be retrieved from previous or subsequent images, provided there are enough of these. The quality of the reconstructed high-resolution (HR) image therefore depends highly on the amount of data available in the LR images. However, in practice, insufficient number of LR observations, motion estimation (registration) errors, and unknown point spread function (PSF) limit the applicability of these multi-image SR methods to small up-scaling ratios with less than 2 under general conditions.